Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.
GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023.
“My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. “Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free [GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe [conference] as CEO, we announced free Codespaces. And so it felt natural, at some point, to get to the point where we also have a completely free Copilot, not just one that is for students and open source maintainers.”
‘free’
So is that ‘sell my data’ free? Or ‘get you hooked on the product and then add a subscription a year later’ free?
Bastards.
Both. And there is no guarantee they are not selling your data even if you pay.
As I like to test things before saying something critical about them, I rushed to my GH account in order to test this “Copilot” from GitHub (it’s a weird name considering that Copilot is also a Bing AI; both Bing and Copilot are Microsoft products, so unsurprisingly there’s zero creativity coming from them).
So far:
- It’s nothing new: it’s just OpenAI ChatGPT 4o under the hood (something I already use through OpenAI’s website, thanks for the nothing burger, Github)
- It’s GPT 4o with supposedly some integration with GH APIs…
- … except that it has no Github Gists integration (I use Gists more than I use repos)
- … and it fails to retrieve the list of all my repos so far (something I managed to manually do through my browser, accessing some endpoint from Github’s API (it requires no token) and using Devtools to map and format the JSON array into a string list)
- The paid version seems to offer the possibility to pick another LLM model: Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT o1 (also known as “strawberry”, who can’t count “how many R’s” are there within its own name) and… that’s it. Also nothing new, even if you ever dare to pay for it.
Summary: a “nothing burger”. It perfectly describes this… “tool”?
If would be amazing to stop using the word free when we are talking about companies like Microsoft and Google
honestly copilot is great just to autocomplete repetitive lines of code but not enough to pay. i find the emmet snippets much better.
I’ve had much joy from using ‘windsurf’, the VSCode clone with the stupidest name.
Oh good, FREE SLOP FOR ALL!
